Isomonodromic deformations: Confluence, Reduction $\&$ Quantisation

Abstract: In this paper we study the isomonodromic deformations of systems of differential equations with poles of any order on the Riemann sphere as Hamiltonian flows on the product of co-adjoint orbits of the Takiff algebra (i.e. truncated current algebra). Our motivation is to produce confluent versions of the celebrated Knizhnik--Zamolodchikov equations and explain how their quasiclassical solution can be expressed via the isomonodromic $\tau$-function. In order to achieve this, we study the confluence cascade of $r+ 1$ simple poles to give rise to a singularity of arbitrary Poincar\'e rank $r$ as a Poisson morphism and explicitly compute the isomonodromic Hamiltonians.